There’s a lot happening in the music world, and we here at Heavy Blog try our very best to keep up with it! Like the vast majority of heavy music fans, our tastes are incredibly vast, with our 3X3s in each Playlist Update typically covering numerous genres and sometimes a…

Even a cursory glance of our biweekly playlist updates will reveal that there is a great deal of variety among our staff’s musical tastes. Due to this, we brainstormed the idea of Playlist Swap, where two of our contributors pick their favorite track from each of the nine albums in their grid…

A quick scroll through this month’s picks will tell you that this is probably the most diverse edition of Editors’ Picks in a while. There’s no grand narrative at operation here; we didn’t go out of our way to include albums from as many genres as possible. It’s just a…

It would be easy to expect most people to come into this wondering who Old Faith is, assuming they’re a fresh band hitting the scene with a debut record. And you’d actually be partially correct, but there’s more to the story where this Greensboro, North Carolina quartet is concerned. This…

For over a decade-and-a-half, mewithoutYou have been unleashing their sonically rich, idea-stuffed post-hardcore upon the world. Lashed together by frontman Aaron Weiss’ esoteric, impassioned lyricism and vocal performances and bolstered by a bass-heavy barrage of post-whatever instrumentation, the band’s tales of existential malaise, religious wrangling, and apocalyptic dread have transfixed…

Each month, we always seem to come to the same conclusion when it comes to our Editors’ Picks column: Friday release days open the floodgates and unleash a seemingly endless stream of quality new music. But while some of our Editors and Contributors sit down gleefully each week to dive into this newly stocked treasure trove, others find themselves drawing a blank at the end of the month due to the breakneck pace needed to keep up to date with what’s been released. Which brings us to this Heavy Blog PSA: a weekly roundup of new albums which pares down the week’s releases to only our highest recommendations. Here you’ll find full album/single streams, pre-order links and, most importantly, a collection of albums that could very well earn a spot on your year-end list. Enjoy!

There are bands whose members keep to themselves, and when their career is up, they recede into the background, never really to be heard from again, except for maybe a side project that is inevitably less well-received than their main band. However, there exists another breed of musicians that seem to make an entire scene out of their own presence alone, and manage to both write solid music and remain incredibly prolific.

Record Store Day is less than a month away, and vinyl fanatics like myself have been stoking our anticipation with the massive list of special releases being featured this year. Of course, it truly is a massive list, and since lines at record stores will almost certainly be even bigger, it’ll behoove all of us to have a game plan prior to fluffing our sleeping bags to camp out at the door. That’s why I decided to sit down – with input from Eden – and list what we believe to be the essential release from this year’s RSD; records that truly capture the essence of that “special release” vibe that the pseudo-holiday has built its reputation upon. This won’t be a comprehensive list by any means, and I encourage everyone to comment with the releases that you’re most looking forward to snagging next month. That being said, head past the jump to see the vinyl nerd in me gush about what RSD 2016 has to offer.